Clarity Before Content: Why Trying to Talk to Everyone Hurts Your Message

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“Trying to reach everyone means you reach no one.”

It’s a phrase we hear often in marketing circles, but most business owners nod politely and keep casting a wide net. They fear that choosing a niche means turning down opportunities. After all, if your services can help everyone, shouldn’t your message try to include them all?

As a strategic consultant and the creator of Define Your Light’s Roadmapping Sessions, I see this hesitation constantly. Clients come in with good intentions and great ideas, but they’re stuck in what I call the content fog — producing a mix of blogs, social posts, and website copy that sounds helpful… but doesn’t land.

Why? Because the message is diluted.
And usually, the root problem isn’t the marketing — it’s the lack of clarity.

I’ve Been There Myself

For a while, I wrote almost exclusively to parentpreneurs. I thought that was my niche – other business owners juggling growing companies while raising kids. And while I absolutely care about that segment (I’m one of them), I realized something important: the people who were actually hiring me weren’t choosing me because of our shared family dynamics.

They were choosing me because I brought calm to their chaos. Because I could translate their ideas into action. Because I made strategy feel personal.

The label didn’t matter. The clarity did.

Why Content Needs a Compass

That realization reshaped my business, my content, and it’s now at the heart of the Roadmapping process I offer. I believe in Clarity Before Content — the idea that messaging only works when it’s grounded in a deep understanding of who you’re speaking to, what they need, and what you want to be known for.

One client, overwhelmed by a sea of possible audiences, told me:

“I feel like I can help everyone. I don’t want to box myself in.”

She wasn’t alone — it’s one of the most common things I hear.

So we slowed down and worked through a focused series of exercises designed to bring her audience into sharper view. Instead of staying stuck in vague generalities, she began to see patterns — the clients who energized her, the problems she solved with ease, and the places where her expertise created the biggest transformation.

Through this process, she realized she wasn’t narrowing — she was refining. Her message stopped trying to speak to everyone and started resonating with the right ones. And with that clarity, her content began working harder — not because she was producing more, but because every word had direction.

By the end, her messaging shifted from general to magnetic.
Her website, emails, and even how she described her work in conversation became clearer and more confident — not because she changed her offer, but because she finally knew who she was talking to.

The Truth About Niching

Niching isn’t about cutting people out — it’s about drawing the right people closer.
It’s how you stop chasing and start attracting.
When your content reflects true alignment, the impression not only lands — it lasts.

That’s the kind of clarity I love helping clients discover — whether it’s in a full Roadmapping Session or a more nimble Marketing Sprint. These focused sessions are all about cutting through the noise, finding the message that truly resonates, and shaping content that connects with the right people.

That’s what clarity creates.
Not just better strategy, but deeper connection.
With your work.
With your audience.
And with the business you’re building on purpose.


Today’s guest post was contributed by friend and fellow networker Erin Jernigan, business & nonprofit strategy consultant,  at Define Your Light. 215 804 6870   www.DefineYourLight.com.

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Real Copy Has to Live in the Fridge

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Take a challenging aspect of your brand and turn that into a selling point, advises Donald Miller in “How To Tell Your Brand’s Story” (Entrepreneur, April 2025). Happy Wolf kids’ snack bars, made from real, whole foods, need to be refrigerated, not kept in a pantry, so they used the tag line “Real food has to live in the fridge“, turning what sounds like a drawback into a positive differentiator. “Most of us are so deep in the trenches in what we sell that we haven’t gotten our head around that one basic idea that will attract people to us,” Miller says; that real-food-has-to-live-in-the-fridge is precisely the type of “sound bite” any provider needs need to find and use in promoting – and differentiating –  a product or service.

Annoyance can be turned to our advantage in content writing. One way to form a bond with customers is by commiserating about their daily pain, identifying something that customers hate, empathizing with them, and then offering solutions. People generally don’t like to have their assertions and assumptions challenged, told that something they’d taken for granted is in fact a lie, but empathizing with prospects’ annoyance without putting them “in the wrong” is the sweet spot for which writers need to aim. “The real-food-has-to-live-in-the-fridge” line flies in the face of a delicate “compromise” approach.

“Whatever your situation, Say It For You helps your company or organization create and maintain a weekly blog and/or a monthly newsletter.  We create content based on a combination of our independent research and interviews with you, your staff, and your customers/clients.”

For business owners and professional practitioners needing content marketing help, our Unique Selling Proposition is that the content is not created using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Is such an individualized approach to content creation more time-consuming? To be sure. More expensive (as compared with DIY- using- AI? Certainly. But those very “disadvantages” enable Say It For You to assign content copyrights to the actual providers of the products and services.

You might say that “real copy has to live where the product is being sold and the service is being provided”.

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Either Way, a Good Bottle is a Good Bottle

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For the average wine drinker, it’s a no-big-deal thing, but for serious aficionados of Champagne and for those in the wine industry, Alison Napjus points out in Wine Spectator, there’s an important distinction:

While small grower producers, or “RMs”, source their grapes only from vineyards they own ,” negociants”, or ” NMs”, purchase their grapes from different villages and subzones. Connoisseurs (“wine snobs”?) might value RM products, but transferring ownership of land among family members is “prohibitively expensive” under French law, Napius points out, and RMs have trouble meeting demand. NMs, meanwhile, have begun paying closer attention to viticulture in their own vineyards.

The result of all this supply/demand push-pull is that the ” perfect” Champagne product today is neither an RM nor an NM, the author explains. Consumers are really just looking for a steady supply of quality Champagne. “At the end of the day, it’s what’s in the glass that matters, not the code on the label,” the author concludes.

The same observation might be made in my field of content marketing, I couldn’t help thinking. “Content marketing works by capturing the attention of your desired audience members and helping them address their informational and task-oriented needs,” Jodi Harris of the Content Marketing Institute explains.

  • Prefer to use straightforward or “Huh? Oh!” titles for blog posts? Doesn’t matter, so long as, in the body of the post, you deliver on headline’s promise.
  • Whether you post content once a week or once a month, consistency helps build trust with your audience.
  • Statistics can be used to demonstrate the extent of a problem or to provide data about products and services a company offers. Either way, when presented effectively, numbers can move readers to make decisions.
  • “Jargon”, industry or profession-unique terminology can be used judiciously by content writers for explaining and defining a point, or simply as a way to establish common ground with a select audience.

Either way, a good piece of content is a good piece of content!

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No Explosion Needed – Just Information

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“There was a time when we were taught to start with the explosion, the crisis, the murder, the detonation of the bomb, then go back and show the reader how we got to this terrible situation. I’ll explain why you might want to avoid this approach,” says book writing coach Myra Levine.

As content creators for business owners and professional practitioners, it’s tempting to be enigmatic in order to arouse curiosity, but at Say It For You, we agree with Levine that it’s not always the best idea.  After all, it’s essential for us to assure readers that they’ve come to the right place to find the information that satisfies whatever needs brought them online to find answers. In other words, the opening lines can set the tone and arouse curiosity, but it’s best not to sustain the mystery very long.

In terms of satisfying readers’ need for information, Brightedge.com comments that many types of content simply do not need very long blog posts to provide value for readers. On the other hand, articles with only a cursory treatment of the topic may not be deemed high-quality content.  “You will want to dive deeper and provide more information.”

One technique used in comedy is exaggeration, which, as humor speaker Jeff Fleming explained to me years ago at a National Speakers Association meeting, can emphasize points you want the audience to remember. In content marketing, however, while we sometimes aim to engage readers and show empathy regarding their dilemma and problem, it’s crucial that we be seriously “factually correct” in describing the extent to which our products and services can be of help.

Should your book start at the beginning or in the middle of the trouble? “These are decisions, and they’re not easy ones to make,” admits Myra Levine.  In creating  marketing content, while we’re out to engage online readers, no “explosions’ are needed, just valuable information with a personal touch.

 

 

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Approaching “the Big Reveal” – from Front or Back?

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To create a compelling story line in a novel, one with maximum impact,  Writer’s Digest editor Tiffany Yates Martin explains, you need to understand when and how to reveal crucial information to readers. On the one hand, it’s important to give readers enough information to feel invested, but you have to keep back enough to keep them “hooked”.

There’s a case for having the information revealed sooner: readers need enough information to give them a reason to care. Vague hints at a “dark secret” can feel manipulative, Martin admits. What’s more, “sometimes you gain more narrative mileage by spilling the beans sooner, so readers see the … impact of the secret on the characters and story.”

Nathan Ellering of coschedule.com translates this very piece of advice for creators of content marketing articles. The pro tip he offers is this: “Write your blog title before you write your blog post. This practice will help you define the value proposition so you can connect it into the blog post, which guarantees your blog title will deliver on its promise.”

At Say It For You, one compromise I’ve discovered is often used by book authors is the “Huh?” and “Oh!” title. The “Huh” title startles and arouses curiosity; the “Oh!”subtitle clarifies what the focus of the book will be. For example, the book title Notes from Scrooge entices, while the subtitle Why Gift Giving is a Lousy way to Demonstrate Love – At Least According to Economist reveals the financial counseling nature of the book.

In content marketing, the “reveal” may take the form of a personal story that showcases the unique slant of the business owner or practitioner, even describing the biggest mistake made in starting that business or practice and what was learned from that mistake.  Precisely because it is so very human to act inconsistently, revealing seemingly out-of-character aspects of the people involved in the business or practice is a way to foster empathy and engagement.

Still, content marketing cannot succeed if our messages don’t break through the clutter and deal with online readers’ very short attention span.  “You’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it,” Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book Made to Stick.

 

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